Electricity sector methodology elements

Bottom-up and top-down

To build the TYNDP 2018 electricity scenario, ENTSO-E used a balanced mix between top-down and bottom-up approaches. This allows the combination of local knowledge and experience of TSOs in predicting the near future with the necessity to deliver long-term scenarios driven by a shared European vision.

– Because the near future is relatively predictable (especially as energy sector investments generally require long development periods), near-term scenarios for 2020 and 2025, as well as Sustainable Transition 2030, make the best use of the local knowledge of TSOs. Each TSO provides their estimation of demand, generation capacity and other elements based on common European storylines for each scenario. After analysis and consistency correction of the data, modelling tools calculate the output value of scenarios.

– Looking further into the future allows more margin of manoeuvre to determine the European and local energy landscapes. Longer-term scenarios (all 2040 and Distributed Generation 2030) are therefore built with a top-down approach and include a set of pre-determined European targets (such as the share of demand covered by RES technologies). – For the top-down scenarios, a Thermal and RES Optimisation phase was added in order to include peaking units for adequacy, access economic viability of plants and optimise the PV, onshore and offshore wind generation in the scenario. More information on optimisation can be found in the Annex II: Methodology.

General process

The process to draft description of storylines and eventually turn them into the results presented in this report involved dozens of experts from all regions of Europe. Here Europe is split into nodes by countries, then some countries further split into areas. A full list of the market nodes can be seen in Annex II: Methodology (1.3.2).

Figure 23: Overview electricity sector methodology

Base case grid

While the scenarios will eventually be used to test future grid infrastructure developments, the construction process focuses on determining levels of demand and generation. To do so, the models use a “base case” network for interconnections, which corresponds to the current grid plus projects considered in the TYNDP 2016(10).

The ENTSO-E TYNDP 2018 will use a more restrictive approach to determine the base case grid for the CBA analysis of projects. Only very mature transmission projects, which have already started permitting, will be considered in the base case grid.

ENTSO-E started a data collection in September 2017 for the new TYNDP base case grid. This new set of data will be fed into the market models to produce the final scenario results, to be presented in the final version of this report after the public consultation.